Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 12, 2014 @04:48PM
from the all-you-debaters-are-welcome dept.

schwit1 (797399) writes with this story from the Associated Press, as carried by Yahoo News: The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.

>> compared to Gitmo and the phoney wars we had because of George W Bush

I hope you realize Gitmo is Obama's mess now. He's had six years now to clean it up - in fact ran on a platform to clean it up - and has done little there except release some pretty evil dudes back into the wild.

The sad truth about the travesty of Gitmo is that it was attempted to be closed but was blocked via procedural means. Only certain penitentiaries can accept prisoners from outside of US soil and in order to do so they must have authorization from the Governor of that region. Sadly all of the penitentiaries that were able to take the prisoners had Republican governors. All of them were asked in turn by the administration, and all of them said no.

It is disturbing how so many actively chose to allow that human rights fiasco to continue just to make one man look bad. Not that you care, considering you think all those people that did not get a trial, that have no evidence against them are "pretty evil dudes".

and in order to do so they must have authorization from the Governor of that region.

It may not have been intentional but you illustrate a big part of the problem with this surveillance: with very few exceptions, the Federal government has no jurisdiction OR other authority to be involved in local/state criminal matters. The only time the Feds are legally allowed to be involved is if it involves interstate or international crime.

If I were someone who was a victim of this illegal surveillance (according to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, as another story mentioned just today, it *IS* a

The sad truth about the travesty of Gitmo is that it was attempted to be closed but was blocked via procedural means.

Just set up a court and hold criminal trials. Try them in gitmo if you have to. Then they're either guilty or innocent.

Nobody objects to people being held in gitmo because the prison happens to be located at gitmo. The concern is that people are being held prisoner without any kind of trial or determination of guilt. Simply moving them around doesn't solve that.

Hold a trial, and if they're innocent you let them go. If the evil Republicans or whatever won't fund flying them home then just let them out a

Congress tried to build in a safeguard against Obama making unilateral decisions on releasing terrorist detainees by including language in the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the administration to alert Congress of such moves at least 30 days in advance.

Obama did not follow that law when he swapped five senior Taliban commanders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Sen. Carl Levin (Mich.), the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services panel, said Obama had a plausible legal argument for ignoring the law.

“The White House did not comply with the requirement of the 30-day provision. However, the White House said it had power under Article II of the Constitution to do what it did,” Levin said. “I’m not a court that’s going to decide whether or not under Article II the commander in chief has the power to move this quickly even though Congress said you’ve got to give 30 days notice.”

So in order for Obama to close Guantanamo, not only does he have to determine that the concentration camp is bullshit, but he also has to determine that Congress's impertinence on the matter is also bullshit.

"non-uniformed combatants" is a made up thing; they are civilians. Criminals perhaps, but if Iran invades your home town and starts

As such, they are afforded protection from neither the US Constitution

Why not? Isn't there something in there about 'all people'? I don't recall it being limited to American citizens?

I mean, granted we don't have authority to impose the constitution or justice system on foreign nationals in their own country -- but we did arrest them, and remove them from their country to territory we control. There's no reason they can't or shouldn't be extended to the rights of our justice system? Why shouldn't we? Would their trial be somehow unfair?

Additionally, most countries where the detainees originate are not signatories to the Geneva Convention, and thus the protections further do not apply to them.

It still applies to us stupid. Sure legally we aren't obligated by treaty but so what? Its the morally right thing to do, and there is certainly nothing in the treaty that PREVENTS us from extending them those protections? Why on earth would we desire NOT to extend them?

You make it sound like we'd like to give them fair trials, and we'd like to extend them rights but we can't. That's bullshit.

"non-uniformed combatants" is a made up thing; they are civilians. Criminals perhaps, but if Iran invades your home town and starts

sorry somehow missed finishing that sentence.... and starts wrecking the place, and you resist, even with violence, and they capture you and take you into 'custody'. You are still a civilian. Even if they wanted to treat you as a soldier, that'd be fine too.

But to invent a new classification for the express purpose of depriving people of the rights you would extend civilians and soldiers is BULLSHIT.

The United States is not signatory to all of the Geneva Conventions.The Geneva Conventions (a number of them at any rate) extend generally to uniformed combatants in the armed services of a government, not non-uniformed combatants working for an NGO or nobody (except in a very diffuse way).

However, for them to be criminals, there would have to be jurisdiction for legal process to occur. I'm fairly certain that the there is no law enforcement jurisdiction belonging the US in some of the places these combatan

As one of my USAian friends, a veteran of 18 years US SF and 7 or 8 more in 82nd Abn before that likes to point out:When Obama was elected, everything was going to be different. Warrantless wiretaps would be going away, Gitmo would be going away, extraordinary rendition would stop, and so on.

Then the new President got his first National Security Briefing. Then nothing changed and the surveillance powers extended, drone strikes intensified, Gitmo is still there, and so on.

However, I'm not sure if the majority of people actually feel this way. My wife and I are truthful to the other, in the extreme. It has meant our first year of marriage was AWFUL, and here 15 years later it is AMAZING, and continuing to get better. It is hard to speak and accept the truth, but it is worth it IF you are willing to handle it.

Again, I'm not sure everyone, or even a majority, is willing to handle it correc

In case you needed any more proof that Obama has had the power to close Gitmo all along, he just traded five detainees for Bergdahl. (the "illegal" portion of his actions was that he didn't inform Congress far enough in advance as required by law)

I think you'll find that a huge number of people will continue to vote for the terrible Republicans, just as a huge number of people will vote for Democrats even when they act little better than the Republicans. And even if Obama hadn't just openly stated that he

Of course, you ignore the fact that President Obama's party had complete control of Congress, with the Supermajority of the Senate, yet did nothing to shut down Gitmo. Now he gets to blame those damn Republicans, just as you do, for all his failings.

Unfortunately for the democrats they are not as "United" as the republicans. They don't vote in lockstep with each other nor do they judge each other by some RINO like measure where it's a bad thing not to vote in lock step with what the party says regardless of their constituents. As a result even though the bill to close gitmo was brought up several times the bill never passed nor really ever had a chance to beat the 60 vote fillibuster threshold needed to advance in the Senate.

Instead was was passed in it's stead was a requirement that he not close, it that he not spend a DIME studying closing, discussing closing or even thinking about closing it. This basically bared the president from doing any sort of research that would convince congress it could be done. This was the work of people like John McCain, rather ironically a former POW, working concert with the republican party and a handful of cooperative blue dog democrats.

Anyone that can argue Obama didn't try to close Gitmo is a blind partisan liar. And anyone that argues Obama is responsible for that atrocity is a fucking idiot. The republican party has responsibility for that prison. Even today the Republican parties official platform includes support for perpetual detention at Gitmo. I'll never understand people that think it's a good idea to waste our soldiers time playing guard duty in what is pretty close to a paradise. It's a waste of money and valuable resources. Those people should have long ago been transferred to a special federal prison such as the recently closed super-max in Illinois that tried very hard to become the site. But people not unlike you insisted without reason that those guys remain in Cuba and the taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to house them in the most expensive military base the US has.

If you think Gitmo is a paradise you're the idiot. It's not a hell hole but it's still a prison. You can blather on about the Republicans all you want but the people that dangle the Republican puppets by their strings dangle the Democratic puppets too. You partisan fools that still believe the smoke and mirror show that is the US political two party mafia system astound me. What little shred of doubt I had about it is gone after the last six years. Obama looks like Bush version 2.0

So it is neither Republicans nor the Democrats fault, it is the lazy electorate, thumb in bumb, mind in neutral who pays no attention at primaries time and allows both parties to be stacked against them and let the Republicans and the Democrats to be turned into the Corporate Party, the party of corporations, by corporations and for corporations, only major corporations and multi-nationals get to play of course.

Whoops there's been a major upset, it seems more people are starting to pay attention to the p

I said the prison was in a paradise, not that it was a paradise. It's called reading comprehension.

And you are making a terrible assumption to assume I favor the democrats, I think both parties are full of shit. But when we're talking about blame for Gitmo that is squarely on the Republicans and will remain there because it IS their fault. Calling them out on that is not favoring the democrats. I'm happy to point out both parties failings, maybe if more people called the parties on it we could degrade this

If President Obama had wanted to close Gitmo, he would have shamed the Democrats in Congress into doing it.

Assuming what you say is true the Democrats NEVER had a filibuster proof 60 votes. So even if the Democrats were as united and you seem to think and EVEN if every single Democrat somehow would bow down and do whatever Obama wanted (which they don't) he couldn't have got it done.

How stupid are you? The Democrats don't vote in lock step. Trying to organize the Democrats in congress is like trying to hear

If President Obama had wanted to close Gitmo, he would have shamed the Democrats in Congress into doing it.

Assuming what you say is true the Democrats NEVER had a filibuster proof 60 votes.

Yes, they did. Not for a long time, but they had it and wasted it. How do you think Obamacare got passed? No Republican voted for it, and no Republican voted to end debate on it. The Democrats had 60 votes to force cloture once they bribed enough of their own party. The Republicans couldn't stop them.

I believe that the problem is that Al Franken wasn't sworn in until well after that session was well under way, Senator Ted Kennedy was missing for many votes due to his brain cancer, and Arlen Specter didn't switch sides until much much later. There were a few other Democratic Senators who were either out or "Blue Dog" and "DINOs" - the Democratic "Party" is actually more of a loose coalition. The Democrats had the seats, perhaps, but nothing more, for a total of 72 days [sandiegofreepress.org].

(Reprinted from the last time I did this comment.)

The problem in closing Gitmo is that there have NEVER been enough people in Congress who are willing to take the political hit of letting anyone leave; witness the fact that we captured Chinese Uyghurs back in 2002, determined they weren't terrorists in 2008, and FINALLY released the last of them in 2014. These were GUYS WE KNEW WERE INNOCENT FOR SIX YEARS and still hadn't let go.

Those people should have long ago been transferred to a special federal prison such as the recently closed super-max in Illinois that tried very hard to become the site.

They should have been there from the very beginning. Leaving aside the rest of your rant, you don't seem to get it that they're there because of Bush and Obama administration "legal theories" that they can be treated there in ways that would be illegal on U.S. soil. While the whole concept might have started with Bush administration, people in the Obama administration haven't seemed to try to refute the concept, either.

I'm not going to try to argue that Obama didn't at least make some small effort. But m

nor do they judge each other by some RINO like measure where it's a bad thing not to vote in lock step with what the party says... working concert with the republican party and a handful of cooperative blue dog democrats.

Just made me snarf coffee all over my keyboard.

(not that I don't find the Republicans more despicable than the Democrats, but the above is still very funny)

America (USA) was a democracy, democracy died long ago at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church driven defense industry mafia in what they did in the 50's and 60's, and they cannot even create the illusion of it anymore. Washington is nothing more than theatrics now and they know it. The path back to a democracy was removed by what they did to the Mason's, the only people that were genetically driven to care for the people. What you are all seeing now is the product of these actions with the screwed fore

Yeah the biggest windfall to the health insurance companies, the hospitals, doctors and big pharma. A license to print money. In the movie "The Graduate" the hero gets some advice "One Word: Plastics." Screw that, it's not plastics, get into healthcare and screw patients over and print money. And now we have all those new IRS agents with nothing to do but stick their thumbs up their asses all day or wait..., this in, I just got an IRS letter today questioning 30 dollars from 5 years ago. W00H00 yeah,

Which is why, if you continue to vote for either of the two incumbent parties, you're part of the problem. And why I am a Libertarian. I'm sure the Libertarian party will have similar issues at some point, if they get stronger, however the Libertarian are the best guidelines for why this stuff matters more than most people care about. So I am not worried about Libertarian party getting corrupt any time soon.

If everyone starts to vote for Libertarian the problem will just be extended. Look at how the "insiders" have taken over groups like the "Tea Party" and moved them from grass roots "People" back to "Career Politicians with new branding.

I certainly appreciate the motivation, but if you are not addressing the right problem then the solution will also be incorrect. The real problem is that corrupt politicians have become entrenched in every possible political office. In order to fix things, the entrenched po

You are providing a symptom, not the problem. Deregulation and a lack of enforcement for existing regulations has resulted in the monopolization of media. The same people that have been monopolizing media for the last 2 (at least) decades are not just paying off politicians, but actually controlling who gets on a ballot with celebrity hype and hysteria. The same media will not allow discussion or countering positions on our Government. The same media will repeat propaganda handed out by the establishment

Perhaps as a secondary rationale. Primarily, they are trying to continue to circumvent privacy protections, warrant requirements, etc. and don't want people to know how they are doing such things so they can't put together a proper case against them.

> i think the Justice Dept. is trying to keep this tech out of the hands of the general public

I expect it is really about the fact that if people know how it works, it becomes easy to avoid.

It should be super simple to write an app that will detect them and warn you about it. They all work by putting up a "microcell" and convincing your phone to connect to their microcell and then on the back-end they route your calls back through the regular cell network. The thing is, they have to use a tower-id that

It's already in the hands of the public, really. Someone used one as part of a demonstration at Defcon in 2010. [venturebeat.com] What I imagine they don't want is to show the public how capable they are of collecting all the information they want without anyone else needing to know, like any business providing any sort of transparency report.

The smartphone: a general purpose computational device with a GPS, camera and microphone, typically carried around on one's person or in one's general vicinity at all times. Most smartphones have built-in functionality below the operating system layer that allows the carrier to execute arbitrary code on the device.

The more I hear about them trying to quell discussion about these things the more interested I get. What in the world is so important about them? What are they hiding? I saw a strange object on a power pole when I was out for a run the other day, it looked like tree roots laid out horizontally... I can only assume it was an antenna of some sort. Was gone the very next day, and wasn't there the day before either... I wonder if it was one of these things?

Re What in the world is so important about them? What are they hiding?
The tech is now very cheap (down from federal/mil/spy/nation only funding) . You are getting a lot of info about people, movements and their devices in a region for state/city funding.
Done with other tech you can get: passenger, driver faces, all the unique data about a phone, data use, location, duration, who is around you. Over time the next step is the voice print.
The legality question is that: fishing for 'anyone' or 'anythi

...the words coming out of these politician's mouths were what they were putting onto paper with their pens, the world would be a much better place. Instead, we have them insisting one thing publicly, while working against that idea in every way possible behind closed doors.

98% of you will still vote democrat or republican, thinking this time things will change. You're right. Things will change... for the worse. And then you will STILL vote democrat or republican again. You have the government you asked for. And quit your bellyaching about lack of choice. I ain't listening. It's bullshit. You decide who is on the ballot.

If every single person who said they would vote third party if it wasn't throwing away their vote actually voted third party, we'd see some serious changes. Just accept that it doesn't matter one bit whether a democrat or a republican wins the election. The results will be the same. Once you accept this simple truth, you are free. Now you can vote for a third party candidate without that fear of letting "the other guy" win. Vote third party. Always. I don't care which third party. Just don't vote for the status quo.

Voting 3rd party isn't throwing your vote away. Most elections are only won by a few percent. When politicians see votes going to 3rd party candidates they ask how they can take those votes, and if borrowing a few ideas from the 3rd party is cheap enough they will do it. So voting 3rd party will shift the politics of the major candidates.

I particularly like how you disassembled the comment and pointed to every place in which it possibly could be wrong. Tell me, do you have a news letter I can subscribe to?

PS, the next time you threaten me with a good time, could you at least use a nick that isn't so over used like Anonymous Coward so I can pick you from a crowd? It's like you said you will be the one in red and green at the Christmas party.

PS, the next time you threaten me with a good time, could you at least use a nick that isn't so over used like Anonymous Coward so I can pick you from a crowd? It's like you said you will be the one in red and green at the Christmas party.

I don't agree with your view on voting third party, put that's funny.:^)

I don't believe that the federal government can change. It's corrupt at all levels. It's too far removed from the people. We need to push control back to the states where the power is more local and the people have more ability to ensure that their representatives actually represent them.

To be fair though, if you're equating "state's rights" with slavery, slavery was there first, and isn't there anymore. Jim Crow laws that replaced slavery are also gone. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and people of other minority groups have a much larger political voice than they did a few decades ago. That isn't going to change if states insist on their sovereignty again.

What "state's right crap" are you referring to? That's the system of government that we were supposed to have. Everything not delegated to the feds by the Constitution is the domain of the state or local governments. Doesn't it make sense to keep government as local as possible?

I don't think it matters who you vote for. Isn't that the Obama "yes we can" lesson of the last six years? We're more divided then ever. There's a major scandal like clockwork, every couple of weeks. People who were lobbyists

There's no way that people can know what a person will do once they're given a position of great power. The problem is, we elect people into positions of great power. Spread the power around, bring it closer to home, divide it up. That's the answer. It's not simply a problem of who we elect, it's what we're electing them to. We elected a "Constitutional scholar" and ended up with someone that doesn't mind trampling it. These positions invite abuse.

Is why does the Federal government care? That they do begs the question, what are they trying to hide? Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to) just a smokescreen for other spy technologies being used by the Feds (think parallel construction here) and shared with local LEO? If so, that's a big problem.

Are the Stingrays (which are useful as a law enforcement tool -- assuming proper warrants are obtained and appropriate restrictions adhered to)...

There are no proper warrants that can be acquired that can authorize the Constitutional use of a Stingray device, nor are there appropriate restrictions other than a total ban on their use. They are the very definition of blanket surveillance and can not be used in any other way. There is no way to utilize them in a warranty-compliant manner because they will always sweep up the details of everyone in the vicinity, and there is no warrant for that. They are impossible to target, therefore their use by law enforcement (or any private organization being using to whitewash their use by law enforcement) is unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

That's black letter law, too, which is why it's being hidden. There is no sell-us-down-the-river Supreme Court decision that has ruled blanket surveillance legal, unlike, say, the assinine decision that is going to get the 11th Circuit overturned for claiming we have an expectation of privacy for our cell phone records (we do, but the Supreme Court has already ruled, in a massive fit of stupidity, that we don't because the phone company is some sort of magical "third party"). That hasn't happened (yet) with blanket surveillance, and it's hard to imagine even the Roberts court going that far around the bend.

That said, I echo the question you and others posted. How could these devices possibly be so valuable that federal agents are conspiring with local law enforcement to hide their illegal use? I'm assuming they're just unwilling to give up their toys, any toy at all, like the petulant children they are.

The USA was the first nation to mandate BY LAW that every cell phone sold in the USA had to constantly provide location tracking information, and the laughable excuse given by Congress is that this facility would help locate some 911 callers. This functionality became a requirement MANY years ago, and has absolutely NOTHING to do with GPS.

After the new law, Hollywood modified the plots of its TV dramas to account for the fact that anyone with a powered mobile phone was locatable to within several meters usi

Hollywood uses phone tracking when it's convenient to the plot, and discards it when it's not. The biggest procedural crime drama on TV (NCIS) had phones being instantly trackable as recently as this season, with people specifically removing their batteries for exactly that reason. That same show ignores that ability when it makes the storyline more interesting without it.

This is going to come out. Not if, just when.When it does - lots of local heads will roll. Politically, not literally.

The scope is very large. The level of participation is very large. The value of a leak is huge, so the first leaker wins the lottery - made for life. Do police get paid enough for that to make economic sense? nope.

The blowback for those who administer this outside of "required to cooperate" is huge. The only response of the leaders that gets them off the hook is to pass that buck upwa

Spidey [mit.edu] is a stingray detector app developed by the ACLU and MIT. This page [spideyapp.com] is a page to get notified when it goes live. The source code is on GitHub [github.com]. It works by comparing the towers you can see at any given moment against what you've seen before and data from the OpenCellID Project [opencellid.org].

This is interesting. I was just discussing this with my friend last night, and proposed this exact solution. However, it's still a reactive solution. It will detect that you may be the victim of a stingray attack, but it won't stop your phone from connecting in the first place. But there is another potential solution, I just don't have enough experience developing android roms to say how it would have to be implemented. The idea is this: maintain a database of all know cell towers (your link to OpenCellID would do nicely, they offer their DB for download). Using a rooted or fully custom ROM, such as cyanogenmod, have the phone compare any new tower to the database prior to connecting. If it doesn't exist in the database, red flag it and don't connect.

The question is, can this be done on the OS level, or does it have to happen on the driver level? If it can be done at the OS level, easy peasy, just modify the code to establish tower connections to include this check. If it has to happen on a driver level, it gets trickier. Most phones use proprietary binary drivers for their cell radios, so they couldn't be readily modified. However, it may be possible to load an intermediate driver, which in turn loads the proprietary driver. If it could be determined which driver calls involved connecting to a new tower, you could just pass through everything else, and only pass through calls to the tower connect function if they passed your database lookup. Trickier, but doable. Because really, you want to avoid connecting to these things at all. Nice though it is to see you're being attacked, it's better to stop the attack before it starts.

This would almost certainly need work at the driver level. I'd be rather astonished if the decision to switch towers is made outside the driver. Most likely this doesn't even reach the processor(s) running the main kernel and remains on the isolated processor which handles talking to the cell network. This might be something to hope for in the future, but it will take pushing the various companies to add this feature. You might be able to get this feature out of CryptoPhone [cryptophone.de] in a reasonable timeframe.

It's odd how the article keeps saying Obama Administration, especially when you know that the whitehouse isn't wasting it's time on local stuff like that.They should specify which departments or people are actually making these demands for the locals to not release the info.They do state specifically in one case, and that was the FBI. You know, one of those three letter agencies that happily lie to Congress, the Senate, and the Whitehouse.

Okay, quick breakdown we have the three branches of government. Law enforcement reports up through the DOJ to the President. Actually all federal government functions except those of congress, and the judiciary are run from the White House. Here's a little graphic that shows this. [netage.com] The FBI is under the white house. Now, they're supposed to be independent and work within the law, but in the past we know that the FBI has done some underhanded things. Things like the whole Whitey Bulger affair. [go.com]

No doubt these devices operate by exploiting security vulnerabilities in the cel networks. If info got out about how it works, they'd have to upgrade every cel tower in existance at crushing expense. "Can you hear me now?"

I wonder if criminal trials or civil suits are taking place while the state or federal governments withhold information from lawyers or courts. Innocent men could be in prison due to withheld evidence.